Maybe I'm just living in 2008, but... what's wrong with just self-hosting a simple blog? Wordpress gets a lot of well-deserved hate (especially regarding feature bloat and security), but it's also very simple to spin up. A VPS is a couple bucks a month, and many hosts have a preconfigured ready-to-rock Wordpress image for less technical users.
It's obviously not the best solution if you want to monetize, but there are other options for that, like Ghost. But I'd be curious as to the fraction of Medium writers that actually turn out more than beer money from their articles.
It strikes me that a lot of Medium content is something that would have gone on a small personal blog in the past, rather than the premium content worth paying for that Medium seems to be aiming for.
I'm someone who has written a lot on Medium in the past and has grown a following in a niche because of that, so maybe I can explain the issue.
Originally, writing on Medium had nothing to do with making money from the writing. In the early days, just the fact that you were writing on Medium instead of your own blog gave you much better SEO and made you much more discoverable. It was much easier to reach a new audience vs. your own blog on your own new domain that will take 6 months for Google to rank in any search results. It was just a much more efficient way to actually have people read what you wrote.
The point where Medium became total trash is when they created an "optional" paywall, but they also made the paywall enabled by default and they give the author a bunch of scary warnings if they attempt disable it. Basically, they blackhole your content if you don't opt in and they won't ever recommend or promote it. So most people who don't care about making money still leave it on.
I still disable the paywall, but I imagine 90% of the content people hit that is paywalled is not because the author thinks they are going to make money. It's because Medium forced them down that path with dark ui patterns. It didn't used to be like that.
> many hosts have a preconfigured ready-to-rock Wordpress image for less technical users.
I used one, and it was kept up to date by the hosting provider, and everything was great until it got hacked. And then the hosting company suspended my account, unless I bought some expensive security solution or fixed my site myself and proved it was safe. I ended up rebuilding the site as a static site and changing hosts. Anecdotal, but I won't bother with a self-hosted Wordpress again. It wasn't a noname hosting provider, either.
It's obviously not the best solution if you want to monetize, but there are other options for that, like Ghost. But I'd be curious as to the fraction of Medium writers that actually turn out more than beer money from their articles.
It strikes me that a lot of Medium content is something that would have gone on a small personal blog in the past, rather than the premium content worth paying for that Medium seems to be aiming for.